GROUND
The TERRA performance combines gardening practices, care for plants and soil (Latin: TERRA) with stories about migrations and emigrants, and reflects on the effort, pain, and adaptation of “transplanting” that occurs in the process of migration, especially the forced change of land.
Reflecting on migrations, the performance aims to awaken empathy with people who have been “relocated” – through movement, songs, contact with plants, soil, and water by actress and musician Ljubica Damčević. The performance includes video recordings in which documentary images intertwine, just like the fates of emigrants.
The motive for creating the TERRA performance is the need to discuss migrants and migrations in a more compassionate way.
We live in a time of a huge amount of global information through access to numerous media and digital platforms. This makes some facts and stories quickly accessible and harder to conceal (such as violence, wars, testimonies of crimes, etc.) but on the other hand, it does not seem to contribute to a general understanding of the Other and feelings and actions of solidarity and help.
Statistics and TV reports do not speak as loudly as we would like, even if they are alarming. Forced displacement has doubled in the last decade. With figures estimated to have exceeded 120 million people in 2024, we are getting used to the suffering of refugees and migrants around the world.
But still, I started to imagine this performance while watching a documentary, precisely at the moment when a Syrian immigrant desperately screamed: “You can’t do this to us, you can’t do this to us!”. Standing in a crowd in front of officials of a European country who was reading a list of names to be moved to another country, this man was on the verge of being separated from his family and friends.
The TERRA performance is focused on the place in our mind and heart that can feel the pain of others and warns about the need to care equally for both people and plants/nature. It calls for awakening to the urgency of caring for our natural environment,
our planet, and our fellow citizens who are seeking a new land.”
J.Anđelić, director of the performance
In addition to Serbia, the performance has been performed, with great success, at festivals in Spain, the Netherlands, Germany, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and France. The performance is played in English, Spanish, Italian, French and Serbian [original].
Impression
This afternoon I watched a short, moving performance by Dah Teatar called “Terra.”
It features plants and people, both with similar fates: uprooted from their backyard and forcibly transplanted into another world – not always friendly and willing to help. In the documentary video that is part of the performance, people are not just refugee numbers, they are faces, expressions, looks from which thoughts and feelings are read.
The whole performance is carried out in front of us by an extraordinary artist, violinist, singer, actress, performer Ljubica Damčević. Her role is a skein of short texts but also songs in Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, our language which she sings to us with her wonderful soft and dark voice.
Admiration for the delicate and investigative direction of Jadranka Andjelić.
But something very special was the audience. Contrary to expectations and entrenched opinion, there were about a hundred high school students in the CZKD hall, from Belgrade but also from some other regions whose languages mixed with laughter, and then with silence during
careful monitoring of the performance. They were shaken by the end – at least those who participated in the conversation with the artists – faced with the feeling that life can be rough and uprooting painful.
Wonderful small but great things and people all around us…but little visible in this cruel time.
Ivana Stefanović, composer and writer
